Crocodile Rock

My draw card for Katherine is the nearby Nitmiluk National Park. The park has some impressive gorges and hiking trails. Hiking sounds like too much effort so I've booked for the riverboat tour.

It's another obnoxiously early start so I'm surprised to see at least 100 people at the park's boat ramp. Half of them hire kayaks - that's madness; the water is ice cold and full of freshwater crocodiles - while the other half have some common sense. The sensible half are herded onto feeding platforms for crocodiles aka aluminium riverboats.

Our tour guide is a confident and charismatic local called Russel. He shows us the aboriginal rock art, local wildlife, river flora, rock formations, and makes the tour interesting with stories and jokes. Some of the jokes seem a little too well polished; I suspect he's done this tour more than once or twice.

There are five gorges on my tour and the boat cannot pass the shallow water between them in the dry season. At the end of each gorge we leave the boat and go "rock hopping" to another boat in the next gorge. The first two hoppings are easy but the difficulty increases as we move further into the park. Some of the older tourists are having trouble. I think it's fun, especially when rocks slip out from under my feet. Our guide warns that injuries do occur from time to time. But I've got air ambulance cover and an injury means another helicopter ride. That would be awesome!

Along the way our guide has been pointing out freshwater crocodiles swimming near the boat or sunbaking on the rocks. I'm terrified of crocs - they're carnivorous beartraps with legs - so I'm gobsmacked when at the fifth gorge he tells us we can go swimming. He assures us the crocs are more frightened of us than we are of them. Bullshit. I stay back on the shore, my limbs safe from evil eyed predators.

After a barbecue lunch we head back the way we came. A combination of the heat and the lunch makes the return trip more exhausting. I'm delighted to reach the final boat and enjoy the relaxing cruise back to the park's boat ramp. This was without doubt the best tour I've been on for this trip.